達人專欄Chapter 5
The True Trophy
Whispers came from deep within the pyramid's massive entrance. Scar felt the sound of the Black Sea swelling and stopped to listen. If his bio-mask's electromagnetic vision could see inside the building, there must be countless white silhouettes running across the floor and flowing along the walls.
The number... is too great, so great that he doubts the annihilation boundary can clean it all up.
The Antarctic Queen did escape the explosion in the last reality.
Lex heard the whispers too. They ran as fast as they could, though they never saw the wave behind them; they ran through the fog and into the bright white light, out of the great shadow of the pyramid.
Equipment from the cave work area, littered with crates, was strewn about, and people had either disappeared or died. By the shaft leading to the surface, Lex finds the console for the track, and Scar helps her stand guard while keeping an eye on her back.
He lost the plasmacaster here last time, so he had to use the combistick and shuriken to fight the Queen, now he's damaged both the combistick and the shuriken, the plasmacaster must not be lost.
The articulated arm is fragile; also, hand-mode will reduce its firepower (and Scar hasn't learned how to modify it yet). Scar's fangs touch the inside of the bio-mask to control the plasmacaster, which immediately folds back and does not detach from the backpack.
Facing the Queen again is his most desired revenge, and though the Mother Ship didn't interfere last time, Scar suspects this reality will accept an undignified shortcut. As long as he confronts the Queen more thoughtfully, will the ending not repeat itself?
Thinking back to the black blade that had blown out of his stomach, Scar felt a vague pain again.
The wreckage suddenly stuck as it fell to the sea’s surface, instantly distracting his attention. He had lost his guard twice on this hunt—once to his shame and once to his own death. Now he's HERE; he's deserved it.
Scar still doesn't know the meaning of this reality, but he will continue to hunt.
Lex had a new idea for an emergency evacuation device this time, finding a wooden box to add to the winch and pulley system as a sled and leaving the box with the piton gun in it.
"Get in!" Lex said suddenly.
Hard Meat, always good at timing, lunged at the hunter's back just as Scar's attention was drawn away by Lex, and a black spear exploded from the glowing green blood of Scar's shoulder. Lex immediately picks up the piton gun.
Scar screams in anger, and as he is pinned by the Hard Meat, he sees another Hard Meat lunge at Lex!
The piton gun, meant to hit the hard meat behind Scar, was now aimed at the new incoming Hard Meat...
"Consider yourself exterminated," Lex shouted as she pulled the trigger.
—Giving death to one of her kind is like an Ooman rite of passage for Lex; she's as tough as a female Yautja kicking a male Yautja around like a ball; it's just that she's so skinny that she doesn't look like she has as much courage and ferocity in her.
Bang!
The back of the Hard Meat's head is ripped open by a shot. Scar breaks free of the Hard Meat and kills it with his blade. The next incoming enemy is Grid again! It hisses in anger and fights Scar.
Scar's fist blade slash hits Grid in the head, deep, but not fatal. Each takes a step back, and the Hard Meat leader quickly charges, and with a loud crash, they fall together, rolling around in each other's deadly embrace.
Finally, Scar's one big kick sends the Hard Meat leader flying into the ice wall.
He should have done that sooner! Scar grunts angrily.
Come on! He'll never roll on the ground with prey again!
But Lex came up like a kid who wanted to go home and dragged Scar to the crate.
Grid stood up, its tail cutting sparks on the ice, and Scar, of course, was never afraid to fight it, and while there was still time before the explosion, he stubbornly wanted to take another round and pin Grid to the ground and rub it like a rag...
But Lex just wants to get away. She used all her weight to slam into Scar's arms, desperately pushing the hot-blooded young man back until he was crushed into the empty box.
Scar yells at Grid, but he has no intention of shaking off the vulnerable Ooman. He really wants to teach that damned Hard Meat a lesson; he's tired of rolling around with it every time! He's going to...
Lex taps the emergency start button.
The emergency release sounds, and the crate takes off. Scar is thrown to the bottom of the crate with Lex, his fangs opening wide in all directions under the bio-mask, his forked tongue shaking outside the fangs with the vibration...
Even with the weight and speed of the load, which was less than half a ton, the crate, calibrated to weigh four tons, was shot up the tunnel like an express train at five miles per hour.
The wind pulled them up, the nail rock lights on either side ran as a white tube of light, and the impact in front of them pinned Scar to the bottom of the crate like the hand of death. The outside of the box smoked from friction until the sky appeared at the end of the tunnel...
"Hold on!" Lex tried to warn.
The crashing snow sweeps them into the abandoned whaling station, where Ooman's upside-down dead body swings like a wind chime in the wind, the crate hits the winch rig, and the shattered remains are thrown into the snow with Yautja and Ooman.
Scar manages to catch Lex with his huge arms and holds her protectively as they fall to the glacier and roll.
As the fall eased, Scar released Lex from his grip, and Ooman rolled unconscious to the ruins of a whaling station, where she lay in the snow.
The bio-mask diagnosed Ooman, and she was fine.
Scar rose from the cold and the wound, still gushing green blood, and stood on one knee in the snow, alert. The blizzard was over, the Bouvetoya Whaling Station was covered in a blanket of snow, the fog was low, and the sky was silently falling snow.
Scar made sure there was no danger around them, then hurried back to the shaft with his bleeding shoulder.
The annihilation boundary had not yet exploded; this time the countdown was set a little late, and he did not think there would be that much time left. If Hard Meats climbed before the explosion, it would be bad.
Scar tried to stare at the bottom of the shaft. At first, he saw nothing, though he heard an eerie echo rising from the bottom. Then he saw twisted shadows sweeping across the smooth ice walls.
Finally, a huge, monstrous, angry form appeared. The Queen's claws dug into the ice, and she carried her children on her back, out of hell and down the shaft toward the human world.
Scar senses that he may not have enough fortune to sink the Queen. She is so close to the surface; she was underground last time. Can the explosion hurt her this time?
Grid also rides on its mother's back, and when it finds Scar, it jumps off and starts crawling. All the Hard Meats poured out like ants, filling every inch of the shaft, ignoring gravity, and forming a black tornado.
Scar's fangs struck inside the bio-mask, but the plasmacaster's armor sparked and the three red dots of the targeting laser went dark... The system backpack behind him got hit too many times, and the impact of falling out of the disengaged device still left the plasmacaster injured.
The Blooding Ritual is even worse this time; as Scar tries to fight for more, he will lose more... Will he finally lose Paya's mercy and Lex?
Scar roars, fumbling with the controls under the panel, and finally, with some effort, gets the plasmacaster to fire again. A Hard Meat explodes on the Queen, its flesh and blood washing over the even more enraged mother.
Had Scar's weapon been loaded with dark plasma, he could have triggered a controlled energy reaction. The damage would have been proportional to the mass of the target... It's a nice dream, but Young Blood can't have that kind of weapon.
If there's a next time, maybe he'll try to shove the annihilation boundary into the Queen's big mouth.
Scar left the side of the shaft, took off his last piece of shattered equipment, and threw it on the ground along with the broken plasmacaster and the broken armor, leaving only the bio-mask, loincloth, boots, breastplate, wrist computer, and wristblades.
The torn thermal nets began to fail, and the cold Antarctic winds took away Yautja's body heat, as if Cetanu were coldly driving Scar out of his sight, better off further away from this replica of Antarctica and the Black Warrior's hunting team.
Scar's internal temperature has dropped to almost dangerous levels...
He returned to his partner before the explosion came, grabbed her by the collar, and dragged her to move. She woke quickly. Scar played her voice on the tape: "Hold on!"
Scar helped Lex to her feet and led her to the whaling station, stomping through the crunching snow. Shortly after, a green flash came from behind them.
A bubble-like gust of wind swept through the area, and the explosion, visible to the naked eye, tore apart the broken house, knocking them to the ground and Lex out of Scar's hand.
Scar's bleeding shoulder showed more green blood. Unable to get up for a moment, one knee was propped up. Another shockwave hit them, and they fell back to the ice.
Everything underground was vaporized, and then the steam melted more ice and produced more steam. Millions of tons of ice threw the building next to the shaft into the air like a house of cards, and everything fell apart.
As the ground began to crumble with the underground pyramid, the remains of the buildings around the center of the explosion were sucked deep into the ground as a volcanic crater began to spread outward, leaving ripples of destruction that were about to engulf Lex and Scar.
Scar grabs Lex and forces her to her feet; Yautja's tolerance for pain is high, and despite Scar's massive loss of blood and temperature, he is able to drag one Ooman forward in a race with death.
The ice shifts beneath Ooman's feet, and Lex staggers, helplessly on the verge of falling into the abyss. She screamed as Scar pushed her up, nearly dislocating her arm, and threw her like a rag doll onto a piece of unbroken ice, rolling on it until she hit a snowbank.
The ice disappeared under Scar's feet.
He jumped and landed safely.
When the ground collapse stopped, the soft snow fell again on the motionless Ooman, freezing her eyelashes. The hazy moonlight of the Hunter's Moon in the distance seemed eternally motionless, and the whole of Antarctica looked like a dusty gray cellar.
Lex finally blinked and woke up, and Scar stood up with a rasping sound in his throat, shook the snow from his body, and came to Lex's side.
As Lex looked up and smiled at Scar.
...Poof.
A piece of broken flesh hit the nearby snow, soaking it with a hiss, a web of scars upon it. Scar can't help but be incredibly satisfied. A small hailstorm of shards began to fall from the sky, the acidic blood long since dried by the impact of the explosion, frozen hard by the low temperature.
They stood again at the edge of the gray cliff, their eyes locked.
Lex waited for fate to show her the way, and Scar's fangs twitched again. He touches his empty waist, this time without the Hard Meat claw trophy.
Scar's bio-mask vision glances at the snow, digs where the foreign object appears, and carefully and solemnly picks up something with his scarred, deformed fist and hands it back to Lex.
—A bloody finger of Grid.
Acidic blood still oozed from the shattered joint, shocking Lex. Scar waited for her to realize what he was about to give her, then squeezed the connecting tube next to the bio-mask with his other hand.
First a tube with a sudden loss of air pressure, then a second.
The frost from the cold melted on Yautja's high forehead, forming droplets of water that could neither freeze nor evaporate, just as he was now trapped in a subtle gray zone.
Unlike last time, Lex saw Yautja's true face at the door of the pyramid. Although Scar knows he didn't scare her last time either, he still likes the challenge.
"Ho!" He unleashes four mandibles.
Of course, no sound comes out of Lex's mouth, her eyes are as solemn as old Yautja's, unperturbed by Scar's cheapness.
It looks like he's going to need a worse idea than a resurrected Hard Meat to impress this partner again...
Scar tilts his head intriguingly and squeezes some blood from a cross section of Hard Meat's finger.
Lex almost flinches, but eventually she learns from Scar's bare forehead that it is honor. The burn was insignificant compared to the pain she felt today.
Scar dabs the sour meat on her forehead.
Lex is the hunter he supervised, fought alongside, and marked, so she is entitled to use his mark. Although Scar's current mark has been tampered with, lightning also fits Lex.
She gave the last mercy to Ooman's companion, and the God of War may have favored her because of that, or he may have taken Scar's original mark because of the Abomination. Either way, Scar will give Lex his mark, not out of gratitude but because she deserves it.
Lex's eyelashes flutter in silent sobs as her flesh is carefully cauterized.
Scar's focus steadily concentrates on her forehead, and a strange sensation arises.
There is not much at the bottom of the Mother Ship, where young people are trapped day after day in a cycle of fighting and sleeping on the floor, with the darkness of space and endless waiting beyond.
Except for the tasks they are assigned, the Yautja can leave the hunt at any time. Just as the sky is raining and it is time to go home, what is left in the playground no longer matters; there is no lingering; after the blood is spilled, they return to the darkness and wait for the next opportunity to dwell quietly in a mental cage. If Yautja can't take it, it's a precursor to becoming a Bad Blood.
Even though Scar knows what Yautja is doing, Lex is more than a hunter who has shed his prey status, and then Scar can reward her and turn away.
He knows that this influence is nothing in the eyes of the elders. She kills Hard Meat, she won't be seen as prey, she might catch the eye of other Yautja because of her climbing skills, but that's all.
Yet for him, meeting Lex, this worthy Ooman, is as important as successfully burning significance.
Perhaps what he took from the hunt for enlightenment and the replication of reality was not Hard Meat finger, or the Queen, or the chance to wipe out his shame... But a living Ooman.
—The new hunter he had given his mark to, the partner who saw him off.
—His Trophy.
Novel's English correction accept, welcome to point out mistakes or provide constructive suggestions. But I will revise it after a while to avoid several different suggestions.
